Bunker Hill

thousands of British soldiers and sailors who suffered from insufficient supplies of food and terrible living conditions, the officers continued to enjoy the finer things in life.
    On February 27 both the Gages and the Graveses attended a ball to which “a great number of the gentlemen and ladies of the town” were also invited. This may have been the event described late in life by Bostonian Hannah Mather Crocker, who had vivid memories of the women’s sumptuous clothes as they glided across the dance floor to the rhythm of a minuet or rigadoon: “Two or three tiers of ruffles on the gown and works of lace and muslin, long ruffles double or triple, the hair powdered white. . . . And all was harmony and peace as the tiptoe step [of the ladies] was scarcely heard, so lightly did they skim along the floor. . . . The gentlemen’s dress . . . was neat and elegant: a white broadcloth coat with the silver basket button [and] silver vellum trimmed buttonhole on blue cloth with gold vellum, satin waistcoat and small cloths with gold or silver knee bands. . . . A handsome worked ruffle around the hand formed a fop complete.” For Crocker, who as a little girl had witnessed the destruction of her relative Thomas Hutchinson’s house in the North End, what she called “The Last Queen’s Ball” marked the sad and inevitable end of an era.
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    The previous fall, the Provincial Congress had formed the Committee of Safety, which in the absence of a governor assumed many of the province’s executive responsibilities as Massachusetts prepared for possible war. John Hancock was the committee’s chairman, but Joseph Warren quickly distinguished himself as its most active member. One of the committee’s immediate concerns was creating an adequate stockpile of military stores for a projected army of fifteen thousand men. That winter, large amounts of goods and materials made their way to the town of Concord: 4 brass fieldpieces, 2 mortars, 15,000 canteens, 1,000 tents, 10 tons of lead balls, 300 bushels of peas and beans, 20 hogsheads of rum, 20 hogsheads of molasses, 1,000 hogsheads of salt, 150 quintals of fish, 1,000 pounds of candles, 20 casks of raisins, 20 bushels of oatmeal, 1,500 yards of Russian linen, 15 chests of medicine, and 17,000 pounds of salt cod. John Andrews ascribed the high food prices in Boston that winter to the incredible amount of provisions stored not just in Concord but “in every town in the country.”
    Since the colony’s inhabitants were not about to donate these supplies, funds had to be collected to finance their purchase. In the fall, the Provincial Congress had appointed a treasurer to collect the taxes that would have otherwise been paid to a crown-supported government. To no one’s surprise, the collection of funds lagged well behind what they had previously been. It was to be a persistent problem: everyone wanted liberty, it seemed, but far fewer were willing to pay for the army that might be required to win that liberty.
    In the winter of 1775, Joseph Warren was in desperate need of funds to purchase the provincial army’s medical supplies. Despite having a flourishing medical practice, he was, he admitted, “much in need of cash.” So he approached his three brothers about donating “a large portion of their small paternal estate” to the cause. That apparently not being enough, Warren had no qualms about approaching his younger brother John, who owed him money for his medical education. John had just started practicing medicine in Salem, and despite the fact that he was barely making ends meet, his older brother asked him to take out a loan for the not-inconsiderable sum of two hundred pounds. Unlike Joseph Warren, who had a history of running through vast sums of money, John had an “abhorrence of debt” and balked at the request. That did not prevent Warren from not so gently asking once again, and in April he purchased from the Boston apothecary John Greenleaf five chests of medical supplies at fifty pounds each with cash that may or may not have come from his younger brother John.
    Warren was not a man of moderation; everything in his astoundingly varied life—from his family and loved ones, to his medical practice, to being grand master of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge—had become caught up in the push for American liberty. By that winter, what was already for Warren a somewhat injudicious intermingling of private and public worlds became even more